Why is UTF-7 dead? It is the only encoding of Unicode that is mail-safe in all environments. And therefore it is is the only encoding possible for many, many languages (because many languages can only be interchanged with Unicode).

At 9:54 AM -0700 5/25/99, Markus Kuhn wrote:
>John Wilcock wrote on 1999-05-25 14:33 UTC:
>> Various RFCs mention the MIME charset name "unicode-1-1-utf7", though
>> semantically this refers to v1.1 of the Unicode standard.
>>
>> What is the correct MIME charset parameter to use for an UTF-7-encoded
>> message? "unicode-1-1-utf7" or just "utf-7"?
>
>Nobody seems to have ever really used UTF-7. So there was no need to fix
>the reference to Unicode 1.1. You should see UTF-7 as an experimental
>encoding only. The world has pretty much decided to use UTF-8 and UCS-2/
>UTF-16 instead. UTF-7 is as obsolete as Unicode 1.1. UTF-8 is now well
>established as a commonly used encoding for MIME and is formally
>preferred in <http://www.imc.org/mail-i18n.html>, which summarizes the
>situation accurately as follows: "Fortunately, very few vendors
>implemented UTF-7, and its use is strongly discouraged in Internet
>mail."
>
>Markus
>
>--
>Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
>Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>